I assume someone could abusively misuse h1b in the traditional Wipro/Infosys way anyway, by doing staffing companies. His fraud was just more capital efficient but not that fundamentally different.
It is probably unpopular, but I think h1b should be ended. Genuine short term needs should be covered through something like L1, and aside from specific categories of non-immigrant visa like medical or educational, we should just expand immigrant visas on a Canadian/NZ style merit/points system. This would be less discriminatory against people from big countries (China and India specifically), avoid some of the abuse possibilities, and be better for employees/immigrants and their families. The only losers would be body shops and large employers who benefit today from a limited form of indenture.
This way the body shopping model breaks. Also in the current system workers tied to an employer have less leverage in terms of demands/wage negotiations, and tend to stick around for a long time, so this part of incentive from the hiring managers perspective will go away.
So Indian outsourcing companies get a visa in October 2010, do not send the person to US till June 2011, the person does a 6 month project then goes back, comes back 6 months later and spends some time and goes back again. At the end they file for lost days recapture and keep on extending the H1 for 8-9-10-12 years because the person has not spent 12 years employed. While this works for the outsourcing companies, the existence of this model creates perverse incentives for any employer as they have no obligation to pay a person simply because they can classify as being employed in different branch (India), on vacation (sometimes), on unpaid vacation (bench).
If the visa was given for 3 or 6 years (with renewal) but you had to a) pay the person or surrender the visa, maybe if you use only 80% for year 1 and the visa gets canceled, and b) there was no extension because of any sundry reasons : initial visa issued in October 2010 expires in September 2016 come what may, you could maybe fix it a little bit. Of course business cycles can bring in some uncertainty but then maybe we can not penalize a single H1 but if the company has deployed only 70% of its H1 staff on US salary, and is still asking for a visa in the next year, it is obviously a no no : if you are such a company then further visas are just not granted.
There are about 4 billion people waiting in line to enter the US if they could.
There is infinite demand for migration to wealthy countries, just as there is now infinite demand for healthcare services now that we are getting older.
The number of people in this or that queue is no longer a valid metric unless we're talking purely about bureaucratic wait times, in which case those should be short.
H1 I think is a good program overall, it needs to be tweaked for fraud.
If it came with a bigger fee, like 5K for approval, it might cover the cost of an 'inspector' popping into the office to check up on H1 status granted individuals.
If companies knew an inspector would pop in once a year without notice, they might be hesitant to go on with the fraud stuff.
I suggest the blatant fraud is done by bad actors outside normal operations but they're enabled ultimately by BigCos who turn a blind eye.
i.e. anyone hiring contractors for more than 6 months have to also back their residency status, i.e. Cisco hires from ABC consulting and the inspectors come in and it's fraud, Cisco is on the hook as well.
That would be one way to help clean it up.
I think there is truly quite a bit of real business demand for H1s - even outside of the scammy stuff and 'replace our engineers' stuff.
Honestly, you are over estimating the number of people who would like to come to the US. There are other wealthy countries which have a revamped immigration policy (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, some EU countries) which manage it well and don't get 4 Billion applications.
> H1 I think is a good program overall, it needs to be tweaked for fraud.
I think H1 also needs to be tweaked for easier transfer across different companies. This will make sure that people on H1 can easily switch if they feel they are getting paid less.
But I do agree with you overall on everything else.
“150 Million Adults Worldwide Would Migrate to the U.S.”
https://news.gallup.com/poll/153992/150-million-adults-world...
There is infinite demand for migration to wealthy countries, just as there is now infinite demand for healthcare services now that we are getting older.
There is a limit to how much can be done to keep people alive.
The real REAL solution to this is to raise up the living conditions of people living in poor countries. At that point even if we had open borders not everybody would move to USA/Europe/Canada/Australia any more than everybody from Louisiana moves to California.
Besides the fees are already up there. I was on an O-1 for a while and IIRC it was roughly $8000 all in between lawyers and processing fees.
No, there aren't, and most of the people who would if they could can't for reasons beyond border policy.
> There is infinite demand for migration to wealthy countries
No, there's not. There aren't infinite people outside of wealthy countries to start with, and not every person outside of wealthy countries would move to them if they could (as we know, because many who would be most able to—notably local elites—don't.)
> H1 I think is a good program overall, it needs to be tweaked for fraud.
H1B is a bad program designed to inhibit wage growth and needs to be abolished.
You really should stop listening to the politicians and learn more about the world.
This quota should be removed.
If they didn’t have those, 90%+ of the immigrants would be of Chinese or Indian origin. Is that what we want?
Of course, many more millions who haven’t applied would immediately join the new queue ...
I’m not sure even the US could deal with a sudden population increase of 30-40 million.
https://m.timesofindia.com/business/india-business/indians-w...
Where did you get the 30-40 million number from?
Disclaimer: I'm a former L1, although I'm pretty sure I would've also "made it" under H1-salary-system above.
Cities are more expensive than small town, and wages go up. Software is a lot more profitable per capita, and thus give higher wages. Then again, there is the startup problem you mention.
I am in favor of a point based system, over the mess we have now, but a trivial.implementation could do more harm than good.
Companies should have to make clear distinction between contracting jobs and full time positions. Salaries should be normalized by COL/Taxes. My unpopular opinion, is that there should be standardized testing (or reuse GRE, TOEFL). In my experience, it id a good proxy for a person's capabilities. Points on education attaintment are obvious, but they should also take into account the country where they received their education, the course itself and the standing of the university. ( in broad strokes like R1,R2)
I am strongly in favor of allowing easier Visa transfer . Should stop any Corp. from underpaying an immigrant, because they know the employee is stuck with them.
Employers in California will win, employers in say Tennessee will lose out. If comp is being considered, then they should also consider the COL.
I think a point system is a good way to go, but it isn’t necessary to end the disparate access that those from India, China, the Philippines, and Mexico face. All that would take is a small amendment to section 202 removing the per country caps.
On a separate but related topic, given how large tech employers treat job applicants I don’t believe them when they say the face a shortage of qualified workers. Actions speak louder than words.
they face a shortage of qualified, but willingly-accept-low-pay workers.
Even that I don't buy. Even if a company were only looking for people it could lowball it still doesn't make any sense to be so hostile and negligent in how it treats applicants it is purportedly struggling to hire.
I've lived in NYC long enough to have seen renters' markets and landlords' markets. Despite all the claims of a tight hiring market, google, amazon, etc. act like they are in a market where they have the upper hand. And actions speak louder than words.
According to this article, about 20% die prior to age 65, and some percentage of those will not have a spouse to provide benefits to:
http://home.bt.com/lifestyle/wellbeing/did-you-know-20-of-me...
>>At the end of 2014, the Trust Fund contained (or alternatively, was owed) $2.79 trillion, up $25 billion from 2013.
>>Trust Fund obligations are considered "intra-governmental" debt, a component of the "public" or "national" debt. As of June 2015, the intragovernmental debt was $5.1 trillion of the $18.2 trillion national debt.
Its still a huge total net negative on the government. And you still desperately need those immigrants to be working 20 hour days doing start ups and build tax paying companies, so that some where some one in mid west can buy an iPhone using SS handouts and scold the immigrants for the very value they provide using that iPhone.
The current L1 is a visa for transferring from a branch of a company in another country to a branch of the same company in the US. I get that you're not talking about the L1 in its current form, but it's far from being a general mechanism for dealing with short term labor needs.
Also being used by body shops to ship in people who otherwise couldn't get into the US. The process is they open up a marginal nexus in a nation with relatively more lax immigration laws to their origin nation, then transfer via L1 into the US from branch to branch. Identification and enforcement against this kind of abuse is very time-consuming, as there are legitimate situations used by legitimate companies. AWS was pitched/started by guys in South Africa, they legit could come to Seattle Amazon HQ on L1.
You could probably lump quite a few visa programs together into that, actually.
Having multiple, smaller groups of people inside the USA also assists integration - instead of being able to fall back on a parallel society, migrants will be forced to integrate and learn English.
Plus, just like the Olympics, diversity makes things interesting. Having (qualified) people from Belgium, Poland, Kenya, Thailand, Japan, Colombia, Mongolia (for example) is more interesting than just India, India, India, China, China, China.... A broader pool of migrants also helps US businesses expand worldwide.
Finally, the schemes should also include a minimum 55% quota of women, from each country. This ensures that any visa scheme does not become completely dominated by men, and addresses past imbalances.
There's also value in having the world's 20 top OCaml developers (15 of them are likely French) as well as the world's top 20 server-side ARM multicore guys (who are also likely French) vs. 40 top OCaml people (where there may be more French people.)
The easiest way to address all of this is for financial value to be the main factor. You can bring in people if they pay something like 200% of the US average wage as a surtax above their regular income tax and other costs. There could be explicit charities to subsidize things other than direct wage income value -- maybe an arts charity covers the $100k/yr to bring in a brilliant artist who is paid an additional $50k/yr in income and pays 5k/yr tax on that.
Why? So you are okay with a guy who does not speak English, doesn't have moderate-high skills, will probably drive Uber or work in some restaurant over a moderately-skilled Indian/Chinese who understands and speaks relatively decent English, just because that guys is an Indian or Chinese? This is the definition of racism.
> Having multiple, smaller groups of people inside the USA also assists integration
No. Knowing the local language, understanding the local culture, knowing some people from a similar culture living in the country (a.k.a having a fallback - so as to not depend on government aid) helps in integration.
> Plus, just like the Olympics, diversity makes things interesting.
Absolutely. But that should depend on the skills and not on the nationality. Skilled people from Belgium-Mongolia would still get in regardless of "diversity lottery visa". What US needs is a point based system which rewards quality over just diversity.
I don't understand why you would say this. Doesn't it make more sense to reserve "racism" for discrimination based on the perception of inferiority of a particular genetic race? And instead use "culturist" or "nationalist" to talk about discrimination by culture or national origin? I realize you aren't the only person to use the term this way, but calling it the "definition of racism" to discriminate on something other than race seems likely to water down the term.
My landlord and the owner of the company I work for both came to the US from Iran in exactly this way and now they both own successful businesses built up from busting their asses driving cabs.
That has been The American Dream™ for generations and not the virtual indentured servitude I always hear about in these discussions.
I'm not sure I understand the rationale behind this? Why does it matter what country applicants are from as long as they have the skills the economy needs?
The Olympics are a performance competition- the guy from “Eastern Rhodesia” might make it but he won’t get any extra help when running against Usain Bolt.
Now you are saying that companies that want to make money will be saddled with less competent talent because of diversity?
I hope these two cases don't go the way of the one against Raju Kosuri. Kosuri, a naturalized American citizen, plead guilty [1] to serious charges of immigration fraud. But due to some technicality in the prosecution's case, Kosuri was handed down a mere 28 months to serve, and is scheduled to be deported to India [2].
Off-topic question: India does not accept dual citizenship. So when the Kosuris became naturalized citizens, they must have given up their India citizenship. Given that, why should India accept them back after they were deemed criminals in their adopted country? What is the legality around revoking naturalized US citizenship?
[1]: https://www.scribd.com/document/322254486/Kosuri-Plea
[2]: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2017/12/24/indian-nationa...
https://www.google.co.il/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/local/public-safety/va-man-behind-20-million-visa-fraud-faces-deportation-after-prison-sentence/2017/12/22/61007138-e729-11e7-833f-155031558ff4_story.htmlEdit: and yes, India, only allows single-citizenship. Accepting U.S. citizenship automatically results in the loss of Indian citizenship.
Not sure about India, but in other countries this "automatic revocation" is neither automatic nor permanent (believe it or not)
Also, given it is not a requirement by the US that the recipient give up their other citizenships, they don't care about the other country knowing about it
I guess that one could ignore this and keep on using their Indian passport - but doing so would be fraud and criminal misrepresentation.
Not had this experience to comment on this first hand.
But as an Indian, I guess they ask you to surrender your Passport at the Indian embassy, and then ask you to apply for a PIO(Person of Indian origin) card.
That means the law is not the same for all American citizens. He is getting a different punishment than another arbitrary American citizen doing the same offense.
Usually the way this works is that country A doesn't "recognise" dual-citizenship, which means if you are a citizen of country A and country B and you commit an offence in country A you don't get to say "well I am a citizen of country B so that doesn't apply to me". I am not sure if India requires you to give up your citizenship on taking another, but if they did it would make sense, and in fact it's surprising that that doesn't always happen. If a citizen of country A wants to become a citizen of country B instead fair enough but it's not in the interests of A or B that they should retain citizenship of A too.
Perhaps the simplest solution is to disallow Indian nationals from applying for H1B completely?
I think its generally problematic if one class of visa comes to be dominated by a single nationality. It does not result in diversity in the host country, for starters.
I think people would be more welcoming of the H1B visa (and expanding it, or offering more rights for those on it) if it wasn't completely dominated by Indian men. Perhaps rules limiting any one country to a maximum of 10% of the visa quota, and ensuring the intake is at least 60% female would assist public perceptions?
There is a similar rule to what you propose in the Olympic Games. Max of 3 athletes from a given country in each track and field event. I always found that rule stupid and artificial. Potentially several of the top 10 athletes in the World can't compete just because of their country of origin.
Wow, this is an incredibly racist and west-centric view.
Are you really going to exclude 17% of the world's population based exclusively on where they were born?
That being said, sure, fraud happens and we need to come up with solutions to curtail that. Not knee-jerk reactions based on political biases.
I have no beef with anybody who has immigrated here and it’s disgusting you would make that assumption. I think this country should adopt a more protectionist stance. People hiring en masse overseas are more often than not benefiting themselves to the detriment of society- unfortunately Washington is asleep at the wheel.
The terms "tech oligarchs" have been part of his verbal repertoire throughout the campaign.
From the historic perspective- With very high probability you are just another immigrant who came here a bit earlier than the guy unboarding jfk flight this second.
Study history. USA was/is built by immigrants. Good immigration policies attract talent that moves the planet forward. Where would USA be today if it wasn’t for many talented people who came to this country to pursue their dreams?
Don’t blame issues caused by corruption and private interests in the upper echelons of power on others.
2) Europe is indeed, largely made of populations that have migrated through the ages.
At no time was the total number of blacks both free and slave, in the US over 25%, yet without any social welfare programs everyone was working.
Further it was precisely the areas which were built up by slavery that were destroyed during the Civil War. Thus negating any advantage gained from slavery.
So no, the country was not built by slavery.
I still think expansion of the h1b program is necessary since there is a lot of demand. But curbing the abuse will definitely help the current set of people opting to use the legal way.
I doubt this is all of it. There’s definitely more in hiding.
How about we invest and offer scholarship in these areas of need instead so 5 years down we don't need to bring in indentured servants.
Or offer permanent citizenship.
Creating fake jobs, falsifying documents, charging money to the people that were applying for visas, "parking" those visas with no paid wages and using those unpaid visa beneficiaries to undercut other firms...
I don't think there's a circumstance in any country in which those actions wouldn't be labeled as "fraud".
And that said, you should really read the article before you make claims like that considering he's a prime example of how far someone would go to abuse employees without recourse.
This not about any of the other actions of “protectionist policy” that you mention.
You cannot do fake job postings in order to bench someone and call it “work around” in order to not call it a fraud and put it in a good light. The overall issue of h1b visa and foreign worker policy is highly nuanced and beyond what can be discussed in HN comments.
To reiterate- I am in support of easier migration of skilled workers than what is done today. But abuse of it (and a stark case at that) is something that harms other skilled workers looking to come in a legit way.
If country has shortage of critical skilled workers - bring them in permanently, based on a system similar to what Canada has.
Lots of pressure to come in on the weekend. I certainly wasn't going to sacrifice my weekends. I'd just tell them no. I could work somewhere else.
But the H1b guys I worked with from India constantly caved to the guilt. If they were to lose the job, they'd have to pack up their entire life and go back to India to try again.
Easy high-skill exploitation.
I think there is a different workplace culture in India. Hard work does not always equate to quality work, occasionally some really braindead stuff comes out that someone slogged through.
If I saw H1B's coming in on weekends, I think its partly cultural and they might also just be younger and have less weekend commitments in general.
On the flip side, if you lose your H1B status you are pretty screwed, so the company has you by the balls and tends to pass you up for promotion.
If there is no quota and no insanely long waiting periods for getting a green card -- H1b will become mostly irrelevant.
In terms of harm, these workers are clearly in demand, so apart from being unfair to other staffing agencies and H1B applicants, this really doesn't do much harm..
H1B is a pretty broken concept to begin with.. I was H1B for 4 years before I decided Trump-land wasn't a good place to set roots.
If you have demand for tech workers and tech workers willing to move. I think most countries and cities would move heaven and Earth to make things work out. Everybody wants to be silicon valley :)
(I don't see why SV has to have the problems it has, they seem fixable)
Yes, foreign workers who are willing to work for less than local market rates are in big demand.
Foreign workers are also very likely to move a big chunk of their wages back to their families every month.
So in terms of harm, there are these at least:
- artificially pushing down local market rates
- money paid doesn't stay in the local economyIf the money was all invested in the local real estate marked you'd also complain :)
> artificially pushing down local market rates
In a market where the median salary is 130k, maybe it's good for the economy -- more than it hurts people.
Germany, Switzerland and other places share the development that 40yrs ago a top career in a top company with was possible with an apprenticeship and without a uni degree.
Do you also assume all bank and atm robberies are done by Romanians?
And all credit card skeaming by Russians.
All money laundering by Brits and all brothels by Dutch.
I don't see any point of making such broad generalisation about a particular ethinicity.
I'm Indian too, by the way, so it pains me to say it, but the stereotype of an Indian committing immigration fraud overseas is establishing itself rather well.
Because of a huge number of Indian students, especially from one particular state. US is marketed as an utopia to them, so they all line up to study in US thinking they will get a job as soon as they complete their studies. Reality is surviving on h1b in US is hard. The students have less than 18 months to get an h1b or packup and leave. The Indians who do these scams know how desperate the students are. This is the only chance they have to recoup their educational expenses and show that US experience in their resume and work in US for couple of years at least. The scammers exploit this situation of students.
I think it will soon come to an end with the current administration finally taking action to end this practice. That means students will have less visas and the number of students will come down.
Once when I visited Hyderabad, I was surprised by the staggering number of IT institutes in the city (around Ameerpet). There's just no way so many people can find a job, but somehow they do! Fraudulent claims in resumes and job applications are very common - and HR folks often advise interviewers to verify claims in depth. IT jobs fraud is an industry.
Here's a picture from Ameerpet which shows the sheer scale of the IT training market there: https://imgur.com/a/AUogLtu
I will just point out one thing:
1. How many immigrants come (total number per year)
2. How they are selected (merit or family)
3. Where they come from (the wisdom of country caps)
Are three separate issues that need not be conflated. People tend to give a mixed solution based on their personal experience.
1. Most first time H1B Visas are taken up by an employee that are paid(typically) less that the college educated US worker. Pay amortized over the lifetime of this employee is even lower because part of it was in places like India where the PPP is much higher and labor is cheap.
2. You can make a lot of money by staying on the edges of the law. For example body shops/consultants.
3. Try stopping such body shops and IT CoS will cause jobs to disappear forever into India. This is the part that most policy makers gloss over. Sure FAANG could hire US side that but they are minority of H1B applications filed.
Possible Changes:
0. Separate all categories from the Quota based Green Card residency filing. This will end the perverse incentive for certain H1B and L1 workers to come to the US for the sole purpose of citizenship. Especially the under the stupid EB1 manager cap.
1. Make it easier for people on H1B categories to study, change jobs and providing for gaps between employment that are reasonable. This will make people less beholden and less exploitable by body shops.
2. Introduce a points based system for Permanent Residence that will award citizenship fairly to everyone based on real effort put in by people to get here. Things like education, language, diversity, age all should count. This will chip away at incentives attached to certain visa types.
3. Completely separate the H1B Visa processing for US college educated from the other pool of H1B workers. Make more granular categories for work visa.